Consciousness returned slowly, like light seeping through a tightly closed curtain.
At first there was only sensation. Damp earth pressed against his back, and something soft brushed against his cheek whenever the wind passed. The air carried the scent of wet soil and wild plants, unfamiliar yet strangely vivid.
He inhaled sharply.
The breath scraped through a dry throat.
His eyelids trembled before finally opening.
A sky stretched above him, vast and pale with early dawn. Faint clouds drifted lazily across the horizon, tinted gold by the rising sun. For several seconds he simply stared upward, his mind blank and unresponsive, as though it had not yet decided whether waking up was worth the effort.
Then confusion arrived.
Slowly. Reluctantly.
"…Where…?"
His voice sounded rough, unused.
He pushed himself upright, the motion clumsy and uncertain. Tall grass surrounded him in every direction, the stalks reaching almost to his waist as they swayed gently in the breeze. The color was strange—tinged faintly with violet under the morning light.
The world felt too clear.
Too detailed.
Too real.
A dull ache formed behind his eyes as scattered fragments of memory began surfacing.
A small room illuminated by a glowing screen.
The quiet tapping of keys beneath restless fingers.
Lines of text forming across a document.
A story.
Right… I was writing.
The thought appeared naturally, yet it carried an unsettling weight. He tried to focus on it, to pull the memory closer, but the details dissolved like mist the moment he reached for them.
Something about the situation felt wrong.
Very wrong.
He lowered his gaze and examined himself. His clothes were simple and unfamiliar—rough fabric stitched into a loose shirt and worn trousers. His hands, resting against the grass, were calloused in places he didn't remember earning.
A faint unease settled in his chest.
"This… isn't my body."
The realization slipped out quietly, as if speaking louder might somehow make it more real.
He rose slowly to his feet. The grass whispered around his legs, bending beneath each step as he turned in a slow circle to examine his surroundings.
Endless plains stretched toward the horizon in every direction.
No houses.
No roads.
No distant smoke hinting at villages.
Only wind and grass beneath an unfamiliar sky.
His heart began beating faster.
Calm down.
He pressed a hand against his forehead and forced himself to think clearly.
Let's consider the possibilities.
The habit of organized thinking felt oddly comforting.
Either I'm dreaming…
He glanced again at the endless field.
…or something far stranger happened.
The word formed naturally in his mind.
Transmigration.
A concept he had read about countless times while browsing online novels. A character dies in one world and awakens in another—sometimes in a new body, sometimes with memories intact.
Ridiculous.
Absurd.
Yet nothing else explained his situation.
He let out a quiet laugh that carried little humor.
"So I'm the protagonist now?"
The joke fell flat in the silent field.
Because another problem soon revealed itself.
When he searched his memories—truly searched them—he discovered something deeply unsettling.
There were almost none.
His past existed only as scattered fragments: impressions of technology, flashes of city streets, the vague familiarity of modern life. Faces were missing. Names were missing.
Even his own name refused to surface.
The realization settled over him like a cold blanket.
Who… am I?
The question echoed inside his mind, but no answer came.
Instead he felt something else.
Something difficult to describe.
At first it resembled emotional numbness, the kind people sometimes experienced after severe shock. But the more he examined the sensation, the more he realized it was different.
It wasn't that his emotions were muted.
It was that something fundamental was missing.
A hollow space lingered somewhere deep within his awareness, not in his chest or mind but in a place that should have contained the core of his identity.
It was absence.
Pure absence.
The feeling was unsettling in a way he struggled to articulate. He felt less like a person and more like an unfinished sketch—outlines present, but the colors never filled in.
He placed a hand against his chest instinctively.
Nothing.
No warmth.
No resonance.
Just quiet emptiness.
"…That can't be normal."
The wind swept across the plains again, stirring the tall grass in restless waves.
For several minutes he simply stood there, allowing the strange reality to settle. Panic never truly came. Fear should have appeared, but the Hollow inside him seemed to swallow most emotional reactions before they could fully form.
Eventually he began walking.
There was no clear direction to follow, yet remaining still felt pointless. Each step pushed aside the violet-tinted grass as he moved slowly across the field, eyes scanning the horizon for any sign of civilization.
Time passed quietly.
The sun climbed higher.
Birdlike creatures occasionally circled overhead, their distant calls echoing faintly across the plains.
He continued forward without urgency.
His thoughts drifted.
If this really is another world…
The idea still sounded absurd.
…then I should at least find people.
People meant answers.
Food.
Shelter.
More importantly, people meant something else.
Emotion.
The realization surfaced without warning.
Although the emptiness inside him suppressed most of his own feelings, the thought of encountering others produced a faint stirring within that empty space—as if energised.
He frowned slightly.
That's strange.
Before he could explore the sensation further, movement caught his attention.
Far ahead, beyond the shifting waves of grass, a thin column of smoke rose slowly into the sky.
He stopped.
Smoke meant fire.
And fire meant people.
For the first time since awakening, a small flicker of anticipation appeared in his mind.
Not excitement.
Not hope.
Just curiosity.
He adjusted his direction and began walking toward the distant smoke, unaware that the emptiness inside is very slighly responding to the thought of human emotion nearby.